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When I peeked through a side window of the horse stable on the ten-acre Shelter Cottage estate, I wasn’t prepared for the shock of what the Cubans had done to Nelson Myles. The precision wounds, the surgical technique, told me it could have been no one else.
Beyond the windowpane, the source of the odd whirring sound Detective Palmer and I had heard was revealed. It was a power drill. Horror is commonly amplified by imagination, rarely mitigated, because the limits of our fears are boundaryless, or so I’d believed until that moment.
The scene-Nelson Myles, hanging by his feet from a rafter, hands bound behind him-expanded the reach of my secret fears and proved that I at least had found false refuge in my own limited imagination.
No, I wasn’t prepared. No one could have been, although I knew the Cubans were nearby when I saw Fred Gardiner’s cabin cruiser banging itself to pieces, grounded on the beach at the western edge of the property.
Rene Navarro and his partner, Angel Yanquez, had already killed one person, used a knife to stab a limo driver to death. Now, trapped in the U.S., they were becoming desperate. They were calling on their old skills, using Malvados techniques to help them escape into international waters or to Cuba before the deadline, in time for the C-130’s drop of the Castro Files.
Gardiner’s boat was as described: a boxy little tincan of a cruiser, aluminum hull, dented cowling, broken VHF antenna. The out drive was tilted upward like the stubby tail of a scorpion. The boat was a walleyed weekender out of its league in the Gulf Stream.
Navarro and Yanquez had run the cruiser up onto the beach, probably not long ago. I knew because of the tide. It was two hours before high, but the flood had only recently floated the boat enough to swing it sideways, beam to the sea. There was no ground tackle deployed, no attempt to secure the boat. The interrogators didn’t plan on coming back to use it again.
It told me their escape hadn’t gone well in the tricky backwaters of the Gulf Coast. Now they’d returned to strong-arm Nelson Myles into flying them out of the country or to commandeer his long-range yacht. I hoped Will Chaser was with them. Reason and instinct told me, however, the boy was either dead… or dying.
I was on the seaward side of the Myles property. A few minutes earlier, Detective Palmer and I had rung the front doorbell, then banged the knocker, until it became evident that the house either was empty or whoever was inside wasn’t going to answer. Through windows, the place appeared peaceful, no sign of a struggle, no indication of forced entry. It reinforced the detective’s suspicion that Myles had meant precisely what he’d told me on the phone: He was fine, stop calling, leave him alone.
When I’d suggested we break in, Palmer gave me an Are you nuts? look but told me she’d wait for a few more minutes while I circled the property, then added, “If you’re carrying a concealed weapon, I swear to God I’ll take you straight to jail.”
I didn’t ask if she planned on arresting me on a weapons charge, or for murder, because I didn’t want to force a decision. But I broke the old rule and lied.
There wasn’t an option. No competent cop would accompany an armed civilian onto private property. To Palmer, I was a vigilante first, a marine biologist second-nothing more. It was too much to ask of her. So I didn’t, even though, in the pockets of my foul-weather jacket, I was carrying items she wouldn’t have tolerated, including an old, fail-safe SIG Sauer 9mm pistol.
I had noticed the cabin cruiser as I circled near the beach onto the back lawn. It was visible beyond a stand of coconut palms, beneath a skull-gray moon, bucking and rolling in the random cadence of abandonment as waves rolled landward. The moon, half full, orbited above the Gulf horizon, casting a milky, funneled pathway to Mexico. It didn’t generate much light, but I didn’t need light to see. Something else concealed in my jacket was a night vision monocular mounted on headgear.
The monocular was a fifth-generation wonder made by Nivisys Industries. I wore it over my right eye like a surgical optic. Flip the little switch and the darkest night became lime-green day, bright as high noon.
Not only did it give me an edge over the Cubans, it provided a comforting safety factor. Palmer had told me she’d stay at the front while I looped the property. But if she got restless, changed her mind and came searching, there was no risk of mistaking her for one of the bad guys.
The interrogators had lied to Nelson Myles about smuggling illegal weapons. But that didn’t mean they weren’t carrying illegal weapons.
I got close enough to the cabin cruiser to convince myself no one was aboard-no one who was conscious anyway. The random seesaw banging would have made the cabin unbearable.
Behind the main house, near the pool, I’d seen two guest cottages and remembered there was a horse stable to the south. Before jogging toward the cottages, I drew the familiar weight of my SIG Sauer pistol and confirmed the magazine was full, a round in the chamber.
Lights were off in the cottages but the doors were unlocked. I did a quick search: Nothing.
Next, I headed to the stable. And there was Myles…
The Yale grad and multimillionaire was hanging by his feet, glasses gone, hair in suspended disarray as if he were adrift underwater.
The man was wearing fresh cotton slacks and a gray tailored shirt. He had probably scrubbed himself clean after I left with the police, then dressed in his cocktail-hour best to counter the humiliation he had suffered on the dirt road.
“I feel filthy,” he had told me, a psychological reaction to my bullying. Looking at the man now, I found no comfort in the fact that what I had done to him did not compare to the outrage the interrogators had inflicted.
Nelson’s head was four feet off the floor. The floor beneath was stained. On a nearby wall hung a phone that had been ripped from its mounting. Beneath it, on a bench, was the electric drill, plugged into an extension cord. They’d probably found the drill in the tool closet. The closet door was open.
The Cubans had done a poor job of duct-taping Myles’s hands. They hadn’t secured his thumbs, but clearly the Yale grad hadn’t realized the opportunity it could have afforded him.
They hadn’t bothered taping his mouth. Ten acres of seclusion and the percussion of waves from the nearby beach guaranteed privacy. To bind his feet, instead of tape the Malvados had skewered holes in the fleshy space between ankle bones and Achilles tendons to insert the cable hooks that now strained against the man’s suspended weight. It was the same technique used in meat lockers to hang beef.
I’m no carpenter, but I recognized the polished drill bit. It was stainless steel, the diameter finer than pencil lead but forged solid, designed to bore through tile or concrete. It, too, was stained.
Myles appeared to be dead. I couldn’t be sure.
The stable consisted of a half dozen stalls, doors open. There were also ancillary rooms, but I didn’t pause to weigh the possibility that Navarro and Yanquez were hiding inside. I crashed through bushes to the front entrance and kicked open the office door, pistol at eye level, flipping off lights as I hurried to the barn’s main area. Darkness was to my advantage.
The ceiling was pitched, twenty feet high, with a loft. On the main beam, a winch was bolted to a boom, used for hauling up bales of hay or machinery that needed to be stored in the loft. It was an electric winch. Tonight, it had hauled up a six-foot man, suspending him like a trophy fish.
Myles heard me as I banged my way into the room, or the sudden darkness had frightened him, because I heard his scarred vocal chords whisper, “Don’t! Don’t… Please don’t hurt me anymore.”
Surprise! He was alive. When he pleaded, “Lights on… can’t see,” I hesitated before finding the nearest switch. I removed the night vision monocular as banks of neon flooded the room with the cheery luminescence of a retail shop. Anyone outside could see us now. I didn’t like it, but the man had been through enough without adding to his fear.
I knelt beside him, saying, “It’s me… Ford. I’ll get you down. You’ll be okay.�
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Myles moaned, “No more hurt me… Please, can’t… Sit it. ..? Can’t stand it no more!,” as the cable made abbreviated pendulum arcs, caused by his recent convulsing, a musculature response to pain. He was having difficulty selecting words and forming sentences. It was because of what Navarro and Yanquez had done to his brain.
I found the winch toggle and lowered Myles almost to the floor before using one arm to lift his weight while my free hand threaded the cable hooks out of his ankles. I attempted a slow, gentle pull, but his reaction told me it was better to do it fast, in one swift motion, like ripping adhesive tape off a wound.
The man screamed again, twice, then began to sob, as I carried him to a stack of hay bales in the corner and placed him on his back. His body felt as light as that of a withered old man.
As I freed his hands, I asked, “Why’d they do this? What did they want?” Myles’s eyes blinked open. “Dr. Ford…?” His relief was audible-and also misplaced, considering what I had done to him earlier.
“You’re safe. You’ll be okay after I call an ambulance.”
It was a lie, but he was too damaged to discern truth.
“Where’s my phone?”
“Phone,” he whispered. “They took… your phone… the Spanish man… sillll-verr-haired man… Woman called… the
… the Cuban answered… Woman’s name is… I saw her picture in the… Nawww York Times…” Myles stuttered, fighting to retrieve words. “The woman… she is in… the Amerr-ii-can Sin
… Sin… Senate.”
Barbara Hayes-Sorrento had tried to call me. Rene Navarro had answered, and still had my phone.
“Did the man know who she was?” A pointless question. Of course he knew, for the same reason Myles knew. I log names with the same exacting consistency I log specimens: last name, first name, title, address. The data would have flashed on the caller-ID screen.
“The Cuban… called her… Snn-Snn-Senator. He asked her. .. to come…”
“Where? Did she agree?”
Myles replied with a helpless shrug: Don’t know.
I said, “Rest for a second, maybe you’ll remember,” as my brain began a rapid review of associated data. Barbara had told me that she was meeting Will Chaser’s foster grandparents tonight in Tampa, then going to a vacation home owned by a senator from Oklahoma. Barbara would have arrived by now. It was likely she’d called me from the airport. Just as likely, she was in a hurry, as always, and started talking the instant the man answered, telling him, “We just landed in Tampa,” or something like that.
I asked, “Your neighbor, the senator, is he from Minnesota?” I was trying to compute the odds. The Senate is the most exclusive club in the country-only a hundred members-but about half spend part of the winter in Florida. A statistical guess: twenty-some on the Atlantic Coast, twenty-some on the Gulf. Still, the coincidence was unlikely, unless…
Myles appeared to shake his head- No, not from Minnesota- more concerned with what had happened to his wife. He whispered, “Did they
… hurt her? I didn’t tell them… where my wife… where Roxanne… was hiding! They hurt me… threatened to kill me.. . but I didn’t… tell them!”
The man’s eyes widened, proud he had defended his wife, but his wife was Connie, not Roxanne Sofvia. It was impossible to know if he’d confused the names or his loyalty. But he had refused. Nothing else mattered.
“Hiding where?” I asked.
“Drove to a friend’s… house… Saw them coming… from the beach… the… Cubans. Told her it… was business… didn’t want her… around.”
I was thinking about Detective Palmer, worried she would confront the Cubans if they’d gone to the house, searching for Connie Myles. I was also looking around the room for a water spigot and a working telephone, or even an alarm button like the one in the Range Rover.
There wasn’t much I could do for the man but summon an ambulance and try to get some water down him. He’d lost a lot of blood and needed fluids. I told myself water might keep him alive, but it wasn’t true. Even if he did live, would he want to?
Myles continued talking as I filled an empty Coke bottle from a water-trough spigot, but he was difficult to understand because the wiring of his brain had been scrambled. Most of what he said was disconnected gibberish. He transposed words or selected nonsensical ones that conveyed no meaning. Inside his head, I guessed, the synapse junctions had to be sparking like meteorites. Even so, I managed to piece together the story.
The Cubans had tried to force him to fly to the Bahamas. They didn’t believe him when he told them Lear employees had flown his plane to Miami that afternoon for servicing. That’s when the bigger man, Yanquez, grabbed Myles and strung him from a rafter.
The interrogators not only wanted the truth, they wanted to neutralize Myles as a witness by erasing his memory but also keep him alive as long as possible. A hostage is still a hostage, whatever his condition, as long as he is breathing.
As they questioned the multimillionaire, the silver-haired Cuban-the veteran interrogator, Rene Navarro-used a power drill to systematically destroy the cerebral lobes that had just provided the answers he’d demanded. It was a brutal, ingenious way of covering their tracks.
The human brain possesses the symmetry of a walnut, and its similarly wrinkled skin has the effect of increasing the neuron surface area. A channel divides the brain into left and right hemispheres. Like a walnut, the hemispheres appear to be twins, but they function differently.
The right hemisphere is associated with creativity, the left with logic. We remember the lyrics of even inane songs for years yet struggle to memorize poems or numerical chains because the right brain storehouses music while the more tidy, less fanciful left brain organizes linear data and is also quick to trash what isn’t vital.
Navarro had a physician’s understanding of how the brain functions, the duties of the various lobes and where they were located within the cranial vault. To create maximum terror but minimize damage, he had begun at the back of Nelson’s head, on the creative side. That, too, was ingenious. After the first penetration, there was less chance of Myles tricking them by composing a believable lie.
There were several entry points. I didn’t count them, but at least one had pierced the cerebellum, which is the command post of coordination and balance. If Myles lived, he would spend his remaining years in a wheelchair.
Judging from Navarro’s knowledge of physiology, and his reputation for cruelty, he had probably waited until the end before targeting the man’s forehead, behind which lies the highly evolved neocortex.
The neocortex is the oversized mammalian brain, complex in its layering and abilities. Memory is stored in many regions, but it’s the frontal lobe that makes us distinctive as individuals, capable of deep reasoning and original thought.
There was no reason for Navarro to destroy Myles as a person before killing him. But he had, needlessly and viciously, used the power drill in the forehead area. Joined by lines, the three holes would have formed a triangle, a one-dimensional pyramid.
I had felt contempt for Nelson Myles. That wouldn’t change, not only because of what he’d done long ago to a thirteen-year-old girl but also because he’d gone on with his life while the child’s family was condemned to suffer through their lives, scarred by loss and haunted by the unanswered question Where is our daughter?
No amount of good deeds or rationalization could redeem his self-centered cruelty. But in the small arena of large personal bravery, my respect for the man once again was on the ascent. Myles had told me he was a member of a noble society, an ancient and honorable fraternity, that his membership was the one good thing no one could ever take away from him. For the first time, those words- ancient, honorable -had credence.
The silver-haired man, called Farfel by POWs, had put a drill bit to the multimillionaire’s head and demanded to know where Connie Myles was hiding. Myles had chosen to endure the horror rather than put his wife-or his lover-in harm�
��s way.
We are a much-flawed species, capable of deeds so inhuman that only humans could devise them. But even the worst of us are capable of acts of heroism and sacrifice far beyond the purview of lesser primates. Here was proof.
I said to Myles, “Drink some of this.” I was holding the bottle to his lips. When he tried to push the water away, his malfunctioning neurosystem only managed to flop one chilled hand on my shoulder, the hand which still wore the Skull and Bones ring. He was dying before my eyes.
I had been in the stable for less than three minutes, yet the life of a man was flickering away. Rather than drink and preserve himself, Myles continued talking, trying to anchor his presence by jettisoning information.
“I told them to… use my boat. Told the… Cubans… gave them the keys… to my… crown?… No!… Keys to my
… Tah… Tah… Uhhh!… Wrong word!”
He was getting frustrated, trying to recall the make of his luxury yacht, a Tiara. He had told Navarro and Yanquez where to find the keys, hoping they would go away.
“Cubans,” I said, trying to reassure him with an easy question. “There were two of them, right?”
“An… eight,” Myles said, managing a smile as if he’d done something clever. For a moment, I was confused but then understood. It was Bonesman code- eight: yes- there were two men.
The death rattle is not folklore. A final spasm of abdominal musculature creates a distinctive crackle. A moment after Nelson Myles died, I flicked off the lights and checked the windows for the first time in almost four minutes.
Standing outside the stable was a silver-haired man and a giant companion. They were staring at me, their expressions amused, as if they’d been watching a television sitcom.
The SIG Sauer was jammed between belt and butt in the back of my pants. I drew it, already leaning toward the window as I leveled the weapon, hammer back, ready to fire. But I caught myself in time. I didn’t shoot.
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